Exploring Foundations and Value Boundaries in Social-Ecological Systems.

Second-order cybernetics can be instructive for considering 'foundations' in emerging fields of study and has a visible role to play for action-oriented, transdisciplinary sciences. This paper explores these insights in the emerging field of Ecological Economics. Second-order cybernetics explores recursion, which can be defined as the substitution of a function for its own argument. This pattern opens the space for a cognitive domain and appears in efforts to regulate the relationship between a system and its environment. Given this, it is evident in efforts to cross disciplinary boundaries such as the boundary between Economics and Ecology and efforts to establish starting points for structured inquiry. In conclusion, it is suggested that the expansive terrain of systems theory and the single-pointed abstractions of second-order cybernetics complement each other in service towards emerging social-ecological inquiries. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]